Laura is a specialist in information and  knowledge management for development with a passion for Open Data. She has substantial program management experience and during the last fifteen years, she has been responsible for kicking off, implementing and leading a range of data, information and knowledge management initiatives focused on land rights. Prior to joining the Land Portal, Laura worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization, ActionAid International and the International Land Coalition among others. Laura holds Master’s degrees in Communications Science and on Economics for Development.

Neil has extensive experience in leading communications for international organizations and of building relationships between civil society, donors, intergovernmental agencies, the media and the private sector. Before joining the Land Portal, Neil worked for the International Fund for Agriculture Development, the International Land Coalition and the International Federation of Agricultural Producers among others. Neil has a Master’s degree in Global Diplomacy and a Bachelor’s degree in German and Sociology. Neil was born and raised in Minnesota (US) and has lived for 15 years in Paris, France.

Erik is a finance specialist providing support and advice to various organizations and associations. He has a particular interest in land and agriculture, and provides legal advice on agricultural tenancy issues, landowners and tenanted farmers. Erik has a Master's degree in history and Bachelor's degree notarial law from the University of Groningen.

Anas Soukar is an experienced monitoring and evaluation expert with a solid background in administration and project management within international organizations. Before joining the Land Portal, he worked with several organizations, such as UNICEF, UNDP, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), and Première Urgence Internationale (PUI), where he honed his skills in monitoring, evaluation, and administrative work. Anas is currently based in Berlin, Germany, pursuing a master’s degree in Geodesy and Geoinformation at TU Berlin. Originally from Syria, he holds a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Damascus University.

Romy brings over 20 years of expertise as a communications officer, researcher, and policy advisor, specializing in various aspects of rural development. Since 2014, she has focused on land governance issues, dedicating more than five years to coordinating the activities of the Global Donor Working Group on Land. In this role, she managed the Land Governance Programme Map, a comprehensive database cataloging donor projects in land governance worldwide. Her professional journey includes contributions to organizations such as GIZ, FAO, CIFOR, and Embrapa. Originally from the Brazilian Amazon, Romy holds a Bachelor's degree in Journalism and a Master's in Environmental Governance.

Lilian is a strategy consultant with more than 10 years experience supporting public, private, and civil society organizations in strategic communications, enterprise planning, and project management. She has worked with Deloitte Consulting in DC and civil society groups in Asia. Lilian is a former Fulbright Scholar and has a Master's degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Charl-Thom is a specialist in land governance and administration with a background in land surveying and information systems design. He is a versatile and seasoned project coordinator with more than twenty years’ experience leading multinational teams and initiatives in pursuit of improved land governance and development. He is passionate about open data, knowledge diffusion and land administration. Prior to joining Land Portal, he worked as a Land Tenure Consultant and was Head of Department for Land and Property Science at the Namibia University of Science and Technology. He was born in Namibia and currently resides there.

Iqbal is a specialist in computer sciences. He holds a Master's degree in computer science. He has 13 years experience with Drupal CMS, including writing Drupal modules and themes.  Iqbal has extensive experience creating dynamic websites using PHP, and is an expert in using classes  and Object Oriented Programming in PHP. He is also adept at configuring  Linux servers and installing PHP, Apache and MySQL.

Habteab is a finance specialist with over 10 years experience of providing comperhensive high qualitycommercial, finance and accounting support services to business across east Africa within hotels, telecommunications, agriculture, financial services and government offices. Habteab has extensive experience with a number of different accounting programs. Habteab has a bachelor degree in accounting from Asmara University and Masters in International business studies-Interdisciplinary from Hanze University of Netherlands. Habteab is originally from Eritrea and resides in Netherlands.

Adam is a specialist in semantic web technologies, server administration, database administration, management of containerized applications, Big Data management, GIS and web development. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Grenoble in France. He has been a consultant for several projects and universities in Europe and Latin America over the last 10 years. Adam is originally from Peru and currently lives in France.

Stacey is a communications consultant for the Land Portal Foundation. She has worked for the Land Portal since 2016. Her focus is on the land rights of indigenous and local communities.

Rick was born in Zimbabwe and lives in Cape Town. Rick has over 40 years of experience in the land sector working in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. He is a former Director of Research and Collaborative Learning with Phuhlisani NPC, a leading South African land NGO, to which he remains affiliated as a Senior Research Associate. He currently curates www.knowledgebase.land  providing news and research links on land issues. He holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town.

The Land Portal's Policy Advisory Group, composed of representatives of donors and founding organizations, provides continuity and stability to our organization. These are our advisors:

Chris is Senior Land Policy Lead at the UK’s Department for International Development and holds an MSc in rural development and agricultural economics from Imperial College London. Chris is an agriculture and rural development specialist with 19 years’ experience in smallholder agriculture, market development and natural resource management in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Robert Lewis-Lettington is Chief of the Urban Legislation Unit at UN-Habitat. Robert has twenty years professional experience, primarily working in multilateral processes and in providing technical assistance in policy formulation and legislative processes to a variety of partners. He leads the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) Secretariat.

Eva Hershaw is the Lead for Global Data and Land Monitoring at the International Land Coalition (ILC), where she is responsible for their data portfolio and the construction of land governance monitoring tool LANDex.  As part of her work at ILC, Eva is a co-chair of the the Alliance for Land, Indigenous and Environmental Defenders (ALLIED) and co-leads the ALLIED Data Working Group.

Dr. Ward Anseeuw, a development economist and policy analyst, is the Land Tenure Lead at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  Previously he served a as aSenior Technical Specialist responsible for “Knowledge, Learning, Innovation and data” at the International Land Coalition (ILC). For  12 years he was seconded to the University of Pretoria as a senior research fellow to the Post-Graduate School of Agriculture and Rural Development and as the co-director of the Center for the Study of Governance Innovations (GovInn) – which he founded in 2012. Ward is originally from Rwanda and currently lives in Italy.

Pascal Bekono is a Telecom & Computer engineer graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique de Yaounde, he works for the Government of Cameroon and he leads a NGO focused on SDG advocacy. He has conducted research projects on Open Data in several countries in Africa. He teaches Data Governance in higher education. For many years, he has been participating actively on Internet Governance with ICANN, DiploFoundation, European School on Internet Governance and Internet Society.

As an open data contractor for the Land Portal since 2021, Keitha Booth has co-authored  the Open Up Guide: open data for improved land governance, prepared open data assessments for SOLI reports for Namibia, Zambia. Zimbabwe, Senegal, Malawi, Botswana and Madagascar and is contributing to SOLI indicator discussions. Keitha is an Adjunct (Senior Research Fellow) in the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka. As Director of the NZ Open Government Information and Data programme she led work on New Zealand’s open government information and data policies. Since 2017 she has reviewed several National Action Plans for the Open Government Partnership and in 2022, she reviewed Taiwan’s National Action Plan.

Tim Davies is co-director of Practical Participation, research coordinator on open data for the World Wide Web Foundation and contributes to the AidInfo program at the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Tim has a Bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University, a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from Oxford Internet Institute, and is currently undertaking a PhD in Web Science at the University of Southampton, focused on the democratic impact of open data.

Paulina Deschamps-Ramírez has over a decade of experience in environmental and social impact projects across corporate, government, and non-profit sectors in Mexico and the United States. Her work in Mexico focused on policy research and advocacy for community forest management. More recently, she led the development of the City of Seattle’s first open data and budget transparency portal that allows users to track spending and learn about the impact of the American Rescue Plan Act funds (nearly $300 million of federal pandemic aid). She has an MSc in Environmental Policy from the University of Oxford. Originally from Mexico City, she currently lives in Seattle, WA.

Marcello De Maria is a Postdoctoral Researcher based at the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development - University of Reading. He defended his PhD thesis titled 'Essays on the Economics of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions' and joined the TradeHub. He worked for a decade as freelance researcher and data analyst with a variety of NGOs, research institutes, national and international organisations. He is interested in land, institutional, trade and environmental economics. He is originally from Italy and resides in UK.

Rolf Kleef is an independent consultant, trainer, facilitator, and developer on online collaboration and open data in civil society, with a focus on making people, processes, and innovative technologies work together.  He graduated in computer science (information systems and knowledge engineering), and has been working with networks of NGOs and public institutions active in international development and global environmental issues since 1994. Since 2011, he has been involved with IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, as Technical Advisory Group member,  and as developer of data publishing and data quality feedback tools.

Juan Pane is the Chief Innovation Officer at Centro de Desarrollo Sostenible (Center for Sustainable Development) in Paraguay. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Trento – Italy and a Computer Engineering degree from the National University of Asunción – Paraguay. He works as a consultant in the field of Open Data, Public Procurement, Data Standards and Transparency for the World Bank, USAID, IDB, OAS and PAHO in Paraguay. He designed the transparency initiatives and open data portals in Paraguay for the Ministries of Health, Education, the Treasury Department, the National Procurement office, among others. He is an expert in the Open Contracting Data Standard and has 9 years of experience in the implementation of the standard in Latin America. He also developed health related data standards for Dengue, COVID and Public Procurement of Medicine and Drugs. He is a lecturer and researcher for Open Data related topics at the National University of Asunción - Paraguay.

Valeria Pesce is currently Semantic Web Specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and was previously project manager at the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR) for 13 years. She is also an Ambassador for the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative.
She has worked for more than 15 years in the areas of information management, semantic web, data sharing, data standardization and more recently data policies, especially concerning agri-food data. She has coordinated work packages and activities in international projects on agri-food data standardization.

Mike Powell is an independent consultant focusing on establishing effective intermediaries between technology developers and ICT users in the development sector. Mike was formerly director of the IKM Emergent program, working on knowledge management in development.